Thursday, August 30, 2012

In What
I’m reading #56, posted on 29 April, and again in What
I’m reading #77, posted on 25 August,I complained that Booksellers NZ’s lists of Premier
Bestsellers was misleading because it was inaccurate and out of date, and
harmful because journalists used it as a source of (mis)information. Some of my
books qualified for bronze and one for silver but they weren’t listed – not
that I cared as they were all out of print, but it was an indicator that all
was not well. And I knew of many other books that had also scored the requisite
sales but were not listed. It was a well-intentioned programme but just didn’t
work. Today Booksellers NZ announced:

Following discussions within the trade,
Booksellers NZ has decided to discontinue the Premier Bestsellers programme.

This programme was established some years ago
to provide publishers with the opportunity of being able to “sticker” books
that had attained certain levels in sales as recorded by the respective
publishers.

To be awarded Premier Bestseller status, a
book needed to have sold certain number of copies, and publishers needed to
apply for the status and pay an accreditation fee.

The programme has not proved popular in
recent years with only two or three publishers applying each year.

“Aside from the loss of interest by the
majority of publishers, the programme has also become widely misunderstood,”
said Lincoln Gould, CEO of Booksellers NZ.

The list of books awarded bronze, silver,
gold or platinum status had, until yesterday, been on the Booksellers NZ
website.

“Media often refer to the premier listings as
a definitive list of the New Zealand books that have sold the most over the
years. As a result, there has been concern expressed that many bestselling
authors have been left off the list.

“However, the list only contains those
books which publishers have applied for,” said Lincoln.

Good. I can’t claim the
credit – the people at Booksellers knew there was a problem – but it’s still a
win.

The 56th in this occasional series of reprints
from Quote Unquote the magazine is
from the November 1993 issue. The portrait is by Bruce Foster. The intro read:

Crop circles, the Bermuda triangle, the
mind of David Lange – these are the recognised mysteries of our time. Yet an
even greater mystery is Owen Marshall’s persistent lack of fame. He’s one of
the world’s greatest living short-story writers, yet he’s hardly a household
name even here in New Zealand. Kate Flannery [the writing name De Goldi was
using then] visited him at home in Timaru.

SOUTHERN LIGHT

The first time I met and talked to Owen
Marshall I noted with great satisfaction how his farewell words brought us seam­lessly
back to the topic of conversation we had begun with a couple of hours earlier.
I can’t remember the subject matter now, but at the time I thought, ah,
tidiness, completion, he’s good at endings just as a short­-story writer should
be.

Six years on, as I return to his Timaru
home, I find the inadequacy, the cuteness, of that earlier summary a trifle
embarrassing. In the interim I’ve read all Marshall’s published fiction and am
acutely aware that its depth and complexity goes beyond mere endings. I have
some hesitantly framed questions to put in regard to this impressive body of
work- seven volumes in 14 years. Also, rumour
has it that Owen Marshall has written a novel and, from the master of the short
form, this is something of a surprise departure.

Aside from his tertiary education and two
stints as writing Fellow at Canterbury and Otago Universities, Marshall has lived
in New Zealand provincial towns for most of his 51 years. He describes himself
firmly as a provincial or regional writer. Born in Te Kuiti, he grew up in
Wanganui, Blenheim and Timaru and has chosen to spend his adult life in Oamaru
and Timaru. It is the sharply rendered social terrain of the New Zealand small
town against which many of his fictions unfold. As we sit beside his open fire
I ask him about his choice of small­-town life.

“In part it is a reflection of my early
personal history, but I like a semi-rural lifestyle,I think I operate best within it, I think I
understand best the New Zealand life of small towns, of the rural hinterland.”

He likes the outdoor life, dislikes crowds
and a lot of noise. But there are other less obvious differences which for him
separate urban and semi-rural New Zealand. “I think it is primarily a matter of
values and stance. Occasionally people from the larger centres have said that
my work is dealing with a New Zealand of 30 or 40 years back – which makes me
smile a little. Sometimes it is – deliberately, as when I’m writing about my
own boyhood – but at other times it’s in fact talking about what is operating
here and now in heartland New Zealand.

“What is New Zealand life in Auckland now
is not the New Zealand life for Tuatapere, for Oamaru, for Methven. There’s a
bit of a sociological timewarp operating and I think city people are inclined
to forget that. The pace of change in those places is very different and even
the nature of the change is distinct.”

Out of the singular rhythms and
preoccupations of small-town New Zealand Marshall has crafted some of our
literature’s modem classics. A sub-group of these, the boyhood stories, have
now been collected in a new volume, The
Ace Of Diamonds Gang And Other Stories, soon to be released by John
McIndoe. The stories are drawn mostly from Marshall’s earlier volumes: “I think
when I started writing I tended to exploit my own experience more than I do
now, though I was never a closely autobiographical writer. I think writers are
attracted by the freshness and insightfulness and vividness of childhood
recollection and find it quite galvanising.”

These stories are vintage Marshall. It is
recognisably, though not exclusively, a male world; the youthful protagonists,
generally pre-adolescent and pubescent boys, collide with and try to make sense
of the peculiar logic of adult affairs, though just as often it is the bitter
realities of childhood that provide the “fairly harsh learning curve of youth”
– as Marshall puts it.

A recurring preoccupation in the stories is
the opposition between the clear-sighted young observer, with uncorrupted
imagination, and the obtuse adult world, obsessed with the pragmatic. All his
stories, in fact, deal in some way with this notion of division: between the
artist and the materialistic world, the outsider and the community, the
emotionally estranged husband and wife. Are the child with the honest eye and
the artist aligned?

“Yes, I do think so. If you like, it’s
doing a little redress of the balance of the artistic or imaginative view. It’s
part of my nature, so it tends to come through in my writing. I think that our
society is very materialistic and often the way the imagination is expressed in
people’s lives is undervalued in society. I tend to be interested in how people
succour the imagination, how they maintain their magnificent or trivial
obsessions. I’m not suggesting that we should disdain conventional aspects of
success. I just think we have to bolster other aspects of life – the inner life
if you like, the internal passions, as opposed to the external ones.”

Nourishing and sustaining the inner life
has of course been an article of faith throughout Marshall’s own writing life.
He has lived that philosophy through 30 years of teaching, fitting writing into
the bits in between work, family and community life – a struggle, he points
out, experienced by most New Zealand writers. Ultimately he has made room for
his writing by pulling back on other aspects of his life: sport and
socialising, and teaching ambitions. “I have fewer friends now than probably 15
or 20 years ago.”

And his ambition, his desire to write, grew
with a degree of success. “I didn’t write a tremendous amount before the first
stories were accepted, because I had a lot of other things in my life, but my
motivation and commitment increased when I began to master a few of the skills
and to place some of my work.”

The careful juggling act which describes
Marshall’s writing life, is in many ways expressive of the man – at least, as
he appears to the observer, clear-eyed or otherwise. He is a measured man, as
precise in his conversation as he is in his stories. He is reflective and
controlled – just as well, I think, since the many interruptions to his writing
might well have driven a less patient person up the wall.

“It may be a disappointing thing for people
to hear, but generally I can pack up my work mentally and walk away from it. I
enjoy what I’m doing, but I can usually switch off. Sometimes I’ll do it by
going and having a game of squash or a walk. I’m still observing, the
copywriter’s still there, but I’m not agonising all day about how I’m going to
carry on tomorrow.”

Similarly, he says that his characters
don’t haunt him. “I’ve been intrigued, reading in biographies of writers, that
their characters have inhabited them. They’ve almost had a demonic possession,
and I’ve always been rather wistful that my characters haven’t had such a
presence, such a life of their own.”

This seems thoroughly consistent with the
relaxed, congenial man, who has de­scribed himself, elsewhere, as a “rather
placid person: and a temperamental optimist. But what of the cruel eye that can
so cleverly convey, for example, the greed of an elderly man’s solicitous,
expectant daughters: “sitting together like well­-scrubbed pink pigs, and
showing their hocks as they crossed their legs. . . their por­cine eyes made
significant appraisal of Mr Poose’s health.”

“The corrosive eye of the writer,” says
Marshall, laughing.

Do the divided worlds of his stories re­flect
his own personality? “Grahame Greene said there was a splinter of ice at the
heart of every writer and I think the writer has to keep the corrosive eye in
check to some extent, because we’re part of the community that we comment on.
Often the satire and the malice directed at a character in the story is
actually the writer’s awareness of his or her own frailty and vices.

“I think the Swiftian disgust with life can
be in the end an overly destructive thing. You need tolerance and wit and
compassion, don’t you. I mean, I’ve lead a public sort of life in many ways, as
an army officer and a teacher, and an administrator in various bodies, and I
can operate there reasonably tactfully, I hope. I’m not a reclusive writer, yet
the corrosive eye is there.”

Was his decision to use a pseudonym a
conscious attempt to divide his public com­munity life and his private writing
life? “Marshall is in fact my second name, and my mother’s maiden name. She
died when I was very young, so I thought it was quite nice to take her name.
Looking back I think it was mainly that I wanted to separate my writing
aspirations from my professional life. I think I was shy and perhaps even
embarrassed in case I was no good at it.

“To show you how sensitive I was, I
remember that I sent a manuscript off and notification of receipt came back on
a card with no envelope and the name Owen Mar­shall clearly visible. I remember
being very angry indeed that it had come through the postal services in that
way. I didn’t want people to know.”

These days people are well aware that Owen
Marshall is in fact O.M. Jones; he says he feels no great dichotomy in terms of
the names. Though we are all various people within ourselves, he says, it is
not a case for him of double personae, two Owens pulling him in different
directions.

Perhaps it is the very steadiness of his
personality, the careful integration of his two lives that has facilitated such
a constant flow of stories over the 16 years since the publication of his
first, “Descent From The Flugelhorn” (he has kept the manuscript copy of that
story, written in green biro). The stories have ranged widely, too, in terms of
technique. The Ace Of Diamonds Gang
has collected some of what may be described as his more “realist” stories – it
is this work which has earned him the tag, “Sargeson’s heir”. Marshall is
flattered by the comparison and says he admires Sargeson’s legacy, but points
out that in fact he has experimented with a variety of narrative voices and
structures.

“I’ve enjoyed writing some post-modern stories,
some surrealism, narrative scripts. Some of my stories are pure exercises in
metafiction. I do use a lot of the devices of the realist – I’m a very visual
writer – but basically I see myself as an impressionist, though whether other
people do. . . Labels are inadequate, aren’t they?”

Given his pre-eminence in the short-­story
form, his assured hand with that moment of epiphany which the short story
exemplifies, it may seem curious that he has turned to the novel. And Marshall
himself, following the rejection of his first two novels 20 or so years ago,
assessed his vision and the episodic quality of his work as being more suited
to the compressed nature of the shorter form. Typically, he is sanguine about
the possible critical reaction to his novel, which is now completed and
awaiting a publisher’s decision.

“I’m not one to worry. I do have a slight
sense that some people are waiting for me to step out of line. Some have been
saying, try the novel, and some may well have been preparing the cudgel, but if
you put your work out for publication you take what you get. I always said I
wasn’t going to be bullied into trying another novel and I would only do it
when I felt I had the subject – which I did last year. That coincided with
being Burns Fellow, so I took the plunge and did almost all of the draft at
Otago.”

The episodic quality is still there, he
says. The novel has no chapters, for instance; its structure is fairly fluid.
Though he never shows his work to others while it is in progress, he is quite
happy to talk about the novel now that it is written. “It’s called Prometheus K and it’s set a little way
in the future. It’s superficially to do with politics, but in reality has a lot
more to do with the verities of the relationship of the internal and the external
and the present and future with the past.”

Divisions again? But he is noncommittal.

Naturally, the move from short story to
novel involved a different way of working. “In some ways it was easier – though
I hesitate to say this since it may be a flop. But I didn’t always have to come
up with something new. Each day I could come to my desk and know what I was
doing. Of course, to some extent a cumulative anxiety built up as to whether it
was going to come together, but at least I could see in advance what I was
working towards.”

He hasn’t abandoned the short story. He is
currently writing fulltime, working on short fiction and toying with the idea
of a radio play. “I suppose what I’m really doing is waiting to see whether the
novel has worked. I don’t want to commit myself to another novel until I see it
has worked.”

The caution is characteristic of the man
and understandable in New Zealand’s writing climate, where a commitment to a
lengthy work may mean years without guaranteed income. Perhaps his needs are
not so great now that his daughters Andrea and Belinda are launched on their
own working lives, but he is aware that writing fiction will never sustain a
sufficient living for himself and his wife Jacquie.

It’s a long way from the romantic notion of
the writer in the garret, but then he has never understood, he says, why
working in a garret should be any more conducive to good writing than working
in an accountant’s town house.

“I think you need a breadth of experience,
don’t you? You need to have been alone, to have brooded, but you also need to
have been successful, convivial. And then it’s often stepping forth from what
you have. We don’t all have to have sailed around South America before the mast
to write an adventure story. There’s Janet Frame’s experience – a limited one
in many ways. But because of the genius of the woman, immensely powerful
material flows out from that experience.”

It’s the balanced kind of assessment I’ve
come to expect from him over several hours of talking. But remembering the
merciless eye of his stories, the bleak worlds conjured, the absolute awareness
conveyed of human venality, I search around for the key to his seeming duality:
the calm, organised, suburban man who is also the writer with the punishing
pen. The epigraph to The Lynx Hunter?
I ask: “One’s real life is often the life one does not lead.”

“I love that,” he says. “I thought that a
very, very significant and interesting comment. I think it certainly applies to
me and to a lot of people whose real concerns in life are internal rather than
external. The life of the mind, if you like. They may spend most of their time
wiping babies bottoms or making shortbread, but what really concerns them is
their painting or their novel. That’s what defines them.

“I have a growing sense of the fallibility
of the real – there are wonderful sights and textures and colours, and it all
seems marvellously concrete on the one hand, and yet, what a miasma it is – it
is really con­cerned with our imaginative conception of it. It’s something I
love about Janet Frame’s writing: there’s this wonderfully realised exterior
and yet a sense of strange things welling up beneath it.”

It occurs to me as I drive home that the
same could be said of Marshall’s own writ­ing, and as usual, he found the words
first. I’ll borrow his other words about Frame (and her words too), for my own
ending: it is the genius of the man that takes us beyond his deceptively
simple, almost opaque exterior to his real life, the life of the writer in the
room two inches behind the eyes.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Laurence
Fearnley, one of my favourite novelists, is on
tour to Wellington and Palmerston North. I’m not sure of the format but
both evenings involve her giving a reading and the audience hoovering up
“drinks and nibbles”. Laurence lives in Dunedin so is rarely sighted in the
North Island – she is the real deal so don’t miss her if you can get to either
event.

Of her eight novels, the second, Room, was shortlisted for the Montana NZ
Book Awards in 2001 and Edwin and Matilda,
the sixth, was runner-up in the 2008 Montana Book Awards. The eighth, The Hut Builder, won the fiction
category at the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards. No prizes for the third, Delphine’s Run, or the fourth, Butler’s Ringlet, but they are both
astonishingly good. As with Lloyd Jones, each novel is quite unlike its
predecessors – you never know what to expect, other than something wonderful.

The Wellington event is on Thursday 13
September at 6pm in the Theatre Laboratory (Wallace Street, Entrance A) of
Massey University. The Palmerston North event is at 6.30pm on Friday 14
September at Palmerston North City Library.

Next week, onThursday 6 September, the Copyright Licensing awards
will be announced. Two writers, chosen from 72 applicants, will each receive
$35,000 for a non-fiction project.

The five finalists for 2012 are:

DavidVeart: Hello Boys and Girls

GeoffChapple: Terrain: North Island

Hazel Petrie:Into
the Darkness

MichaelCorballis: The Wandering Mind

Vincent O’Malley: The Waikato War 1863-64

The awards are funded by CLNZ’s Culture
Fund. Two research grants of $3500 will also be awarded: the winners have
already been announced and are Kelly Ana Morey for a literary novella about
Phar Lap and David McGill for a biographical exploration of his
great-grandfather who became the mayor of Auckland.

CLNZ says that last year’s winners of the
$35,000 awards are well underway with their projects. Malcolm McKinnon reports
that his The 1930s Depression in New
Zealand is progressing as planned and should be published sometime in 2013.
Melissa Williams’ Te Rarawa in the City:
Maori urban migrations from North Hokianga to Auckland, 1930-1970 is “going
very well” , she says, though “community consultation has been a little more
time consuming than I expected”. No surprise there.

Since the first award winners were announced in
2001, nine books have been published and three more are well on the way, among
them Steve Braunias’s New Zealand: The
Biography which is due in bookshops any day now. Let’s hope his novel follows soon after.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Recently I have been listening in the car to the Bee
Gees and Pink Floyd when the Concert Programme announcers got too annoying,
which is often, so here is a mash-up: Scissors Sisters live at Glastonbury in
2010 performing the latter’s “Comfortably Numb” in the style of the former’s
“Staying Alive”:

What I’d really like to see/hearis a mash-up of a Bee Gees song in the style
of Pink Floyd. A man can dream.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Alerted to the fact that
Paul Litterick has a book review in the September issue of Metro, which is reason enough to buy a copy, I went into the village this morning and duly bought the new issue. It is quite good.

Paul’s review of Jim Flynn’s preposterous
new book Fate and Philosophy, from
the hitherto reliable Awa Press, is brilliant – the review of the year if not
the decade. Seriously. It is vicious but fair, attacking the book not the
author. Flynn gets off lightly – if I had reviewed it I would have been much
nastier and said that the idea that some guy from Otago’s Pol Studs department
had anything to offer on philosophy was risible. I thought his The Torchlight List was arrogant, but
this is breathtakingly so. As Paul says:

This is a book about life’s great questions.
[. . .] These questions have bothered philosophers for centuries but, happily,
Professor Flynn has answered them all to his own satisfaction.

The review proceeds to demolish the book,
and skewer Flynn’s self-satisfaction, in the kind of writing that we
want from Metro: informed,
opinionated, amusing. And what makes it such a great review is that is
describes the book properly, giving us enough information so that we
can judge for ourselves whether the criticism is fair.

Elsewhere in the magazine is Waikato Times columnist Joshua Drummond
on why he loves living in Hamilton, and pieces by David Slack, Steve Braunias,
Charlotte Grimshaw, Jesse Mulligan and Donna Chisholm, among others. That’s quite a
line-up. Also two pages of wisdom from Michael Horton, former publisher of the NZ Herald, on the future of our
newspapers and why the Herald’s
change of format may not be enough to save it. I don’t like everything in the magazine but that’s a good thing – I am not the target market. But I am
impressed.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

In the comments to What
I’m Reading #76, in which I criticised a story in the Sunday Star-Times claiming that people don’t read New Zealand
authors, Anonymous writes:

I suppose a) I will be the 100th person to
post this link, and/or b) you are already aware of the link, but here is Pia
White’s thesis towards a Master of Information Studies:
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10063/2343/paper.pdf?sequence=4

I have yet to read it, so can make no
comment on the strength of the statistics, but I find strange (I may be missing
the obvious) is that Ms White called for volunteers to fulfil her questionnaire
in May, 2012
(http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10802688)
and the thesis was submitted in June 2012.

I have a MSc (Auck) and by golly, it took
me more than a month to collate, analysis, and write up my data. Perhaps I was
doing it wrong.

The Herald’s
call for volunteers said:

Finally, we have had a request from
Victoria University masters student Pia White who is looking for adults aged 16
and over to complete an anonymous 10 to 15 minute survey about their reading
preferences and attitudes. The survey can be found at: http://is.gd/readnz
(please copy and paste to your browser). Participants have the chance to win a
$50 Booksellers book token.

Ms White’s thesis thanks booksellers and
libraries for circulating her call for volunteers so it wasn’t just Herald readers. But I think we may
assume that the respondents were not randomised in any way, were not filtered
at all in that clever way statisticians have of making sure that survey respondents
reflect the general population. There were 557 participants but only 497
completed the questionnaire (which is no longer available online).

This is not to criticise Ms White, but the SST piece based on her paper is not
journalism. As Anonymous #2 said in a later comment :

It was a half-baked, melodramatic article.
The reporter quoted English professor Mark William from Victoria University but
utterly failed to connect the fact that Ms. White’s research came out of the
same university. It also completely misrepresented and overhyped the findings
(I’ve had a quick read of the paper) – she doesn’t claim in any way that her
survey is ‘representative’ of all NZers and acknowledges the limitations
imposed by timeframes and sampling techniques etc. [. . .]

The reporter was so focused on
sensationalising a single point that she failed to give the research due
context: it is simply a very small scale exploratory piece which could provide
grounding for more rigorous research. And we could hardly expect reporters to
focus on (or even mention) such findings as the vast majority of respondents
believing NZ fiction was on par with (or even better than!) overseas fiction in
terms of quality and originality, now could we?

The story also says that “Only four Kiwi
novels have made it to platinum bestseller level” – without explaining what
that means or even considering that the list, drawn up by Booksellers NZ, might
be out-of date (which it is).

While we’re on the subject, the list of New
Zealand fiction bestsellers that Booksellers NZ publishes each week, and which
is the basis for all journalistic comment on sales of New Zealand fiction, is
seriously flawed. For example, Emily Perkins’ novel The Forrests does not appear on that list, even though it has been
selling by the pallet-load, because it was published in England. It’s the same
for Nicky Pellegrino, whose sales figures dwarf anything that has made it to #1
on that list, because she too is published overseas. They are both New Zealand
authors, and it is ridiculous and deeply misleading that they are not counted
in these lists.

It is not hard to find out these things if
you sit down and talk with a publisher, as I did yesterday. They all have the
BookScan weekly reports on their computers so can look up the lifetime sales of
any title. I learned a lot – much of it surprising, some of it depressing. Most
booksellers, I think, can do this too. So any decent journalist should be able
to cultivate a source in the industry and get not only data but also context. What
I’m seeing is stories either based on a press release or written after firing
off questions by email (e.g. the North
& Southarticle
I fisked last year: I asked some of those quoted in it and they confirmed that was
the method used). It is a useless approach – the only way to get the real story
is to talk face-to-face with people who will correct your initial
misunderstandings and will, in answer to a follow-up question, tell you the
important stuff that you hadn’t thought, or known enough, to ask about.

So what I am reading is Flat Earth News by Guardian
journalist Nick Davies. Published in 2008 by Vintage, it is an excellent
account of why modern journalism is rubbish. Random House is the distributor
here and has a few copies still in stock. Highly recommended.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Today is our 14th wedding anniversary and
also Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 84th birthday. Coincidence? To mark the occasion
Birmingham Opera is staging the first performance of his opera Mittwoch aus Licht. It’s an
extraordinary work, magnificently mad – it’s the one with
helicopters, and here is a
review of the choral first movement. Alexis Petridis attended
rehearsals of the whole thing. Quote unquote:

The musicians, too, seem to be bearing it
all with good grace. I say as much to Vick, who is watching proceedings, as he
expects at least some of the audience to, recumbent on the floor. He nods, then
reconsiders. “I don’t think Bruce on the trumpet’s very happy about it,” he
says. He has a point: swaying gently a few feet from the ground, Bruce on the
trumpet is wearing the kind of rictus grin that conveys abject terror.

Some say that social media is the magic
bullet for self-published authors of e-books. Ewan Morrison disagrees,
forcefully. Quote unquote:

Let’s look at the stats. If we take Margulies
and Penn seriously, how much time does this leave for actually writing? Most
self-epublished authors hold down a day job, so let’s give them three hours a
day, after work, for author activities. That’s 1,095 hours a year. Reduce this
to 20% (since you have to spend 80% of your time covertly self-promoting
online), and you get 219 writing hours a year, which works out as 18 12-hour
days to write a book.

Some say that Noam Chomsky is a deep
thinker, an oracle and a miracle. (Via David Thompson)
Benjamin Kerstein disagrees,
forcefully. Quote unquote:

Third, he is essentially the last totalitarian.
Despite his claims otherwise, he's more or less the last survivor of a group of
intellectuals who thought systemic political violence and totalitarian control
were essentially good things. He babbles about human rights all the time, but
when you look at the regimes and groups he's supported, it’s a very bloody list
indeed.

Not reading but watching: A.D. Miller of
the Economist, and author of Snowdrops, gives his
views on the Pussy Riot case and what it says about free speech in Russia.

Just as policy can make the climate crisis
worse—mandating biofuels has not only encouraged rain forest destruction,
releasing carbon, but driven millions into poverty and hunger—technology can
make it better. If plant breeders boost rice yields, then people may get richer
and afford better protection against extreme weather. If nuclear engineers make
fusion (or thorium fission) cost-effective, then carbon emissions may suddenly
fall. If gas replaces coal because of horizontal drilling, then carbon
emissions may rise more slowly. Humanity is a fast-moving target. We will
combat our ecological threats in the future by innovating to meet them as they
arise, not through the mass fear stoked by worst-case scenarios.

Another
stupid story (just as stupid as this
one), this time in the Sunday
Star-Times, claiming that New Zealanders don’t buy or read New Zealand
books. The second sentence tells us:

Pia White had more than 500 readers fill
out a survey questioning their reading tastes and views about New Zealand
literature.

What the online version doesn’t give is the
intro in the print version:

Why don’t Kiwis read New Zealand fiction?
That’s the question Victoria University student Pia White posed in a research
paper for her masters degree.

Degree in what? Did the paper get a pass?
What exactly is its status? How did the journalist come to know about it? How
were the “more than 500 readers” selected? Is that enough for a useful result?
What were the survey questions? Bah humbug.

What the law really needs is a damn good editor
armed with a heavy blue pencil. If our copyright law could be written half as
well as the books by our Kiwi authors, we would have a law that reflects modern
commercial reality and provides a welcome boost to an important industry.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

I spent yesterday in Wellington being a consultant in an hour-long meeting. It took a whole day to get there and back, flights from Hamilton being intermittent. This was for the book trade so of course it was a whole day of being unpaid. But it was well worth it: before the meeting I got to meet my lovely niece and her lovely baby daughter at Maranui; have a long lunch with an old friend at Nikau; have a long chat with Tilly at Unity Books; and afterwards overhear my publisher tell another of his authors that he had read my new manuscript and thought it “quite good”, which is an academic publisher’s version of “awesome”. And then my publisher bought drinks.
It was just like the
good old days.

In other news: the Winn-Manson Menton Trust is calling for applications by 21 September from established and mid-career New Zealand writers for the 2013 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. There are strings attached – you have to live in Menton in the south of France for at least six months and work in the Villa Isola Bella where Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote towards the end of her life, and it pays a measly $75,000. Yes, $75,000 for six months. But if that appeals and you don’t find the money on offer insulting – or if you do but can swallow your pride –
get in touch with Marlene LeCren of Creative
New Zealand and she’ll tell you how to apply.

The grumpy
publisher Kevin Chapman, president of the NZ book publishers’ association PANZ, has a more cheerful message
about New Zealand’s role as the Frankfurt Book Fair’s Country of Honour in this
letter dated 17 August:

Dear Colleagues

The Guest of Honour programme has moved
from planning to implementation of the major stage, so I thought I should
update you.

Over the period between mid-July and early
November, we will take part in over 300 events, in over 50 cities and towns
across seven European nations (primarily Germany, but also Switzerland,
Austria, Belgium, UK, France and Italy).

We are working in partnership with 110
organisations, including 12 literary festivals, 10 Literaturehauses, 34
publishers, museums, bookshops, etc.

A group of 67 New Zealand authors will
present their work, and over 80 author visits to Germany will have been
organised by the Guest of Honour team. The programme for the Pavilion at the
fair is complete and has been very well received by our colleagues at the fair.

New Zealand books in translation will be
the focus of up to 600 German bookstores through a window display competition.

Translations published or confirmed for
publication since the beginning of GOH, and through to 2013, are now at 90.

Much of the programme team are now based in
Germany until after the fair, and the New Zealand-based PANZ staff are now
working on detail such as individual schedules for each of the 67 authors still
to travel.

We are on the cusp of delivering one of the
greatest promotions New Zealand writing has ever seen.

Thank you for
your support.

Kevin Chapman

President

Watch this space for more good news from publishers and more moaning from authors.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

To Auckland last night for the last night
of Barry Humphries’ season, and probably the last night of Barry Humphries in
Auckland.

It was a wonderful show and it was lovely
to see him resurrecting Sandy Stone whom I don’t think he has performed for
years – when he came on stage in his dressing gown, obscured by clouds of smoke, I thought,
“What is Steve Braunias doing up there?” Les Patterson’s gay Catholic priest
brother was new to me; some of the jokes were old but still funny; Les’s
spitting was as impressive and disgusting as ever. The all-singing, all-dancing
backing quartet of two hot guys and two hot gals, the Condiments, were terrific
too, as were the terrified audience members dragged up on stage. I was sitting
on the end of the fourth row from the front and feeling vulnerable until then.

It wasn’t quite a greatest hits, but
partly. The standing ovation after Dame Edna and the Condiments finished their
set and tossed the gladioli was well deserved. And then Humphries stepped
forward briefly as himself, doffing his hat in the manner of Leonard Cohen, and
speaking beautifully. All in all, as Sandy Stone would say, it was a nice
night’s entertainment. Peter Craven began his review (not online) of the Australian leg of the tour
for the Spectator with:

He has dominated the nation and the world
like no other comedian, like no other actor in any medium. How extraordinary it
is that some luvvie-ish boy from Melbourne Grammar in the mid-Fifties could
take the crumpled suburban idioms of his native Melbourne and turn them into a
thing of magic and mayhem so that Edna became an avenging deity of Australian
femininity (as black and berserk as a land of misogyny and matriarchy could muster)
and Sandy Stone could bleat his mute little circumlocutions and clichés like
the voice of a nominal maleness nothing in his society would uphold.

So – not that they have anything in common
apart from savage satire and the alter ego of an Edna – here is
playwright Joe Orton in April 1967, interviewed by Eamonn Andrews about his
prank of defacing library books: he was sentenced to six months in jail. Asked about it, he says, “I had a marvellous time in prison.” And yes, the
blonde is the wonderful Eva
Gabor.

You can see some of the defaced covers here. Four months later, on 9
August, Orton’s boyfriend Kenneth Halliwell battered him to death with nine
hammer blows to the head. Orton was 34. Much, much more about him here.Monitor: The Age of Uncertainty

Thursday, August 16, 2012

This item appeared in last week’s email
newsletter of the NZ Society of Authors. Kevin Chapman, president of the NZ
book publishers’ association PANZ, had requested a right of reply to the two items
on the Frankfurt Book Fair’s Country of Honour programme published in the
latest issue of the NZSA’s magazine New
Zealand Author. That is not online as far as I can see but it’s clear
enough from his comments what he is complaining about:

1. The criteria for selection of writers
for the programme were approved by a Reference Group that included authors
(including a NZSA representative), publishers, Creative NZ, NZ Book Council,
Copyright Licensing, and a literature festival expert. The criteria has been
misquoted repeatedly. Nobody has been made part of the programme unless they
meet the criteria. These criteria, very importantly, are being promoted by the
book fair to other Guest of Honour programmes as a sterling example of how
criteria should be structured.

2. The criteria were designed to sell more
rights into the foreign language markets and sell more NZ-authored books
specifically to the German public. They were designed to get greatest long-term
author and publisher benefit from the substantial moneys expended by the
government and the industry. This is already succeeding in 2012 and titles
signed for 2013 publication are growing already. We will exceed substantially
every target we agreed with the government.

3. Our opening press conference last
October featured Witi Ihimaera , and I spoke at length about what was special
about NZ writing and books.

4. Books and authors are the centre-piece
of our programme. The vast majority of events under our programme are writers.
The largest part of the performance budget is around writers. We will have
delivered over 80 author visits to Germany to book fairs, literary festivals,
and publisher-run author tours. Incidentally, we were only funded for 52.

5. The cultural programme that seems to be
such an issue is actually required of every country undertaking Guest of
Honour. It is part of the contract with the book fair.

6. Tourism has had very little involvement
with the programme and has had no impact on the author programme. The chefs and
“NZ is Cooking” event that seems to be a problem is not a NZ invention, but was
inspired by the very successful “Iceland is Cooking” event last year. Oh, and
cookbooks are books.

What seems to get repeatedly lost is that
the GOH programme is not an opportunity to put a bunch of writers into
Frankfurt for five days in October. It is an invitation to showcase a country’s
cultural goods, in the whole of Germany, for much of the year. That is what we
are doing. The book fair staff we deal with are mystified by these criticisms.

Do I sound grumpy? Yes I am. The repeating
of groundless information does not make it valid. Some of us have spent some
years working on a very special task, that of putting NZ books and authors at
the centre of a national showcase in Germany. It is very close to reaching its
high-point, and is delivering exactly what our hosts have hoped for, so I think
we will now return to that task.

Carter: La Cote Basque, now sadly closed. I took Igor Stravinsky and his wife
there. We got a table in the middle of the room, speaking French, and a man
came in, and said in rather good French, “will the maestro please give me an
autograph?” Stravinsky said “Certainly not.”

His wife did a great deal of talking in Russian and finally he agreed, but took
forever to write out his name. The man waited and waited and by this point the
whole room was watching.

Finally Stravinsky was done and the man thanked him and walked away. We asked
Stravinsky if he knew who he was and he said, “Certainly, I see him on
television all the time.” The man was Frank Sinatra.

Before there was Iggy
Pop there was Iggy Stravinsky. Anyone who was rude to Sinatra is fine by me. Later:

Tarmy: Can you attribute your longevity to
anything?

Carter: I have no idea. I do a little bit
of exercise every morning, and now I read in the paper that exercise for older
people is bad for the harp – for the heart, not the harp, I mean. The harp is
bad enough.

If I live to 103 I hope I will still be as
sharp as that and cracking jokes.

So here is Nicholas Daniel with the BBC
Symphony Orchestra under David Robertson in the 2008 BBC Proms performing the
first half or so of Carter’s oboe concerto written in 1986-7 when he was a mere
78 or so. Still spiky after all these years:

That Neil Heywood murder in China: there
will be books on this and its ramifications. Talk about secrets and lies. Here is the Economist on it, and here
the Daily Telegraph. Shockingly, it
is not until the sixth paragraph that the Telegraph
tells us which school Heywood attended (Harrow, since you ask); the Guardian is even sloppier,
waiting until the 10th par. And here is Hong Kong resident (and Quote Unquote reader) Ulaca on the subject:

When senior PRC mandarins murmur about the
need to retain the Chinese politico-judicial “system” (such as it is) and
eschew the Western tripartite approach involving separation of powers among an
executive, a legislature and a judiciary, who but the most naïve among us does
not understand that what they are advocating is merely the continuation of a
rotten status quo in which positions of power, wealth and importance are
guaranteed for them and their offspring?

Is philosophy literature? Jim Holt says
yes. He would, wouldn’t he, because he has a new book out, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential
Detective Story:

The
result is an eclectic mix of theology, cutting-edge science (of the
cosmological and particle-physics variety) and extremely abstract
philosophising, rendered (mostly) accessible by Mr Holt’s facility with
analogies and clear, witty language. Some of the arguments he traces are
familiar, from various attempts to prove the logical necessity of the existence
of god to speculations among more adventurous physicists that the universe got
its start as a kind of lucky quantum burp. But there are some odd and less
familiar shores, too, such as an attempt to tie existence to an alleged
necessity for goodness. There is also the argument that the universe exists
because there are many more ways to exist than there are not to exist—and so
existence is more probable.

More on Fifty Shades of Grey – it is a
weird phenomenon but as Grumpy Old Bookman reminds
us, there was a precedent set not so long ago. In France, naturellement.

When intellectuals come out fighting: James
Zuccollo, an economist at NZIER, blogs
at TVHE on a spat between Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of Why Nations Fail, and Jared Diamond who
reviewed it for the New York Review of
Books. Their letter in reply is, ah, robust – as is Diamond’s response. JZ
provides all the links you need.

The full
report from the judges of the 2012 NZ Post book awards is available as a
PDF from Booksellers NZ.

You could call this magical realism in the
wreckage of civilisation or something, but you could also call it a missed
opportunity – minus any post-Katrina politics, you sense that the film is
closer to a form of exotic tourism in poverty fetishism or even that most
odious of movie clichés, the magical negro for white festival audiences.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The results of the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction
Contest, in which entrants are asked to “compose the opening sentence to
the worst of all possible novels” have been announced. The winner is Cathy
Bryant of Manchester with:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed
into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the
tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein,
each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation,
whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed
regrouting.

There are various genre categories – adventure,
children’s literature, fantasy and so on – and the winner of the historical
fiction section is Leslie Craven of Hataitai with this:

The “clunk” of the guillotine blade’s
release reminded Marie Antoinette, quite briefly, of the sound of the wooden leg
of her favourite manservant as he not-quite-silently crossed the polished
floors of Versailles to bring her another tray of petit fours.

As always there are gems among the
also-rans, for example this from Rebecca Oas of Atlanta, Georgia:

Ronald left this world as he entered it: on
a frigid winter night, amid frantic screams and blood-soaked linens, while
relatives stood nearby and muttered furious promises to find and punish the man
responsible.

And this from Howard Eugene Whitright of
Seal Beach, California in the crime section:

The blood seeped out of the body like bad
peach juice from a peach that had been left on one side so long the bottom
became rotten while it still looked fine on the top but had started to attract
fruit flies, and this had the same effect, but with regular flies, that is not
say there weren’t some fruit flies around because, after all, this was Miami.

Monitor: Steve “Money Shot” WhitehouseUPDATEA week later, Stuff catches up and interviews
Leslie Craven. Sadly, he says that he has “no desire to expand the
paragraph to a full novel”.

Monday, August 13, 2012

The 55th in this occasional series of
reprints from Quote Unquote the
magazine is from the November 1994 issue. The illustration was by Anna Crichton;
the intro read:

The best way to lose friends and influence
people is to judge a competition or an award. Denis Edwards talks to some recent judges – who all asked to remain anonymous – about the pressures they faced.

JUDGMENT DAYS

There’s a convention in journalism that the
writer should interview lots of people, get a range of points of view and open
up the mysteries of the issue for you, the reader. By the end of the article
you are supposed to have the subjects’ knowledge and opinions laid before you,
so you’ll know everything, and can make up your own mind.

When this works it is wonderful. The writer
has a glow of fulfilment at a job well done and the readers get their minds
opened to an issue and all its shades of meaning.

Trouble is, it doesn’t always work like
that. People know their pearls of wisdom are going to be written down and will
appear in print, preserved for posterity.

There’s a reason for all this preamble. The
subject we are talking about here is the judging of literary contests. Now,
this has provoked anger in the past, no doubt about it. But it’s also a subject
on which people can become circumspect.

You don’t, for instance, get many people
going as public as Vikram Seth’s English publisher who looked over the Booker
Prize shortlist, saw A Suitable Boy
wasn’t on it and called the Booker jury a “pack of wankers”.

New Zealand lends itself to this.
Everything here is on a small scale, and everyone knows everyone else, or at
least knows where to find them, making it virtually impossible to avoid a
lively quote upsetting someone you’ll eventually find yourself sitting beside
at a literary do. Mix in the prob­ability that today’s judges are tomorrow’s
contestants and, the concept of revenge being alive and well, it’s a bloody
miracle anyone is prepared to say anything about anything ever.

Judge A has seen this in action, and sounds
a clear warning about underachieving, and possibly jealous, writers becoming
judges. Think of the horror erupting if he’d gone on the record and named
names. Boutros Boutros-Ghali wouldn’t have been able to get troops here quickly
enough.

Judge B, a veteran of judging, laments an
apparent love of revenge among our writers, editors and publishers, pointing
out that Australians seem to have a much healthier and more mature attitude to
these things: “They have a blow up or a dispute then there is an explosion,
sometimes even stand-up fight. And that’s that. Things get going again. Here
things seem to fester and simmer away forever.

“Being a judge gives you tremendous power,
at least for awhile. When you’ve got someone driven by jealousy you’ve got
trouble, with yesterday’s men trying to keep tomorrow’s talent from getting
ahead of them too quickly.”

Brisk stuff this. Little wonder no one was
prepared to put it on the record, to be caned with it in times to come.

Everyone agrees about one thing: they get
plenty of opportunity. Blame New Zealand’s size for this. Because it’s small,
there is a shallow pool of suitable people for the work, which as all again
agree, is onerous.

This creates a pattern: judge once or twice
and then duck out of sight for a few years, to be smoked out once more by a
call to do your bit. Reasons for accepting include preventing someone seen as
grossly unfair taking control of everything, or giving one’s own agenda another
outing, or simply a sense of noblesse oblige.

Being asked can be flattering. Then there’s
the gratitude, the profile piece in the local paper, the little zing of having
arrived; of having washed up far enough on the literary beach to be seen as
worthy of assessing everyone else’s efforts. Sadly, some judges’ qualifications
for this are not always high. In other countries, decades of either teaching
writing, or a shelf-full of one’s own tomes are a prerequisite, but here a book
of short stories or a book of poems – even a handful of book reviews – will
sometimes do.

This, the flattery part, does not last. For
some, the afterglow lives only for as long as it takes to bore all their
friends with the news. It is quickly replaced by the chain gang part, with the
judges dragging themselves to the letterbox and trudging back to the study to
end up with another couple of hundred manuscripts to wade through.

This is lesson one. Judging is hard work.
Judge C estimated that he read over 200 short stories through once, and then a
shortlist of about 20 several times. “It wrecked Christmas that year. I had to
read all this stuff and most of it was awful. All these people were labouring
away, and basically they were producing shit. That’s a bit harsh and it’s a bit
sad but that’s how it is. If reading it all doesn’t take the edge off your
Christmas I don’t know what would.”

Judge D, judging a similar competition,
reported being deeply saddened by the entries. “Here were all these scripts
done on typewriters and computers and things, and they’d had to learn to work
them and all the rest of it. All that effort, money and equipment was out there
somewhere, and so little of worth was getting on the page,” she said. “I found
that really upsetting, because it all seemed such a waste. It really did.”

All agreed the toughest part about being a
solo judge was just that, being alone. It took strength not to cave in and find
something readable that resembled one’s own

work, and toss the prize in that direction.

It’s tempting, after the hundreds of
entries have been whittled down to 20 and then to four or five or so.
Exhaustion has long been a factor by now. That, plus uncertainty as to what is
truly good or merely good, causes confusion and doubt, which is why the
familiar looks the safest port, and the prize goes to the nearest clone of
yourself.

Knowing this is useful for those taking the
cynical view towards entering competitions, and intending to write something
aimed specifically at the judge. It shouldn’t, but it might just work. Judge C
points out that Owen Marshall is judging the lucrative Sunday Star-Times competition: “If I were entering I would be
inclined to set the story strongly in New Zealand and salt it with the values
of the east coast of the South Island.”

On the other hand, someone’s inability to
do that is no reason not to enter. “Competitions are lotteries, pure and
simple. I don’t see them as a pointer to whether someone has real writing
talent or not. As often as not the winner comes right out of left field, from
someone who has one brilliant story in them, and you never hear from them
again.”

There are exceptions. Marshall is a regular
finalist in writing competitions, proof of his skill and versatility. Though,
as Judge C says, “He can do that, but I don’t think there are very many more
like him out there.”

This is getting close to the heart of
competitions: winning the things. Someone has to. Well, actually that’s not
quite true. The judge could decide there is no worthy winner, say so and let it
go at that. Doing that means learning the precise meaning of the expression “in
your face”, as explana­tions are sought, sometimes bluntly, from disappointed
entrants. Taking the “no-winner” route is something best left for judges with
the reassurance of an international airline ticket in their pocket and a taxi
waiting to take them to the airport immediately after they make the
announcement.

The in-your-face factor is also seen after
a winner is named. Feminist fury rained down on journalism lecturer and
commentator Brian Priestley’s head when he decided to give a feature-writing
award to someone other than Sandra Coney and Phillida Bunkle, authors of the Metro article, “The Unfortunate
Experiment At National Women’s”. Priestley, it appears, has not offered himself
as a judge since.

There are tales of judges doing more than
just nod in the right direction of political correctness. There have been harsh
words over attempts to steer prizes towards women and Maoris because the judges
are women or Maoris. Judges have been reminded that some big names are among
the entrants and their fame should be acknowledged with placings and prizes. In
recent years, publishers have been known to remind judges of the importance of
their books, and how much it would mean to them to be a winner this year.

However, take heart. Despite all these
attempts at manipulation, the judges I spoke to all shared one thing. They
tried to be fair. This wasn’t easy, as they all discovered – and quickly. Each
responded to the pressure by doing their best to weed out the bad writing and
reward the good.

All agreed that short-story competitions
are definitely not a place to experiment with new forms. Strong stories, with
power, insight and emotion are the way to go. All that roaming the further
reaches of post-modernism will get you is the deconstruction of your chances of
scoring a cheque.

Oh, and don’t copy other people’s work. It’s far
too easy to spot. As one judge said, “Judging was a voyage of discovery for me,
in that I discovered why my work gets published and sells. It is original, not
like anyone else’s, and I think people like its uniqueness. I was looking for
the same thing in other people’s work and it was disappointing to find so
little of it in the entries. The ones who did were the winners. It was as
simple as that.”

Friday, August 10, 2012

There will be more material from Quote Unquote the magazine, I promise,
as soon as I finish editing these two books and reporting on these five
manuscripts. In the meantime:

Matt Nolan, an economist, rips
into the Herald over its article that started with: “Economists have proven it’s cheaper to let Maori children
die than spend money to provide equitable health treatment.” I saw that and
didn’t read the story because from that first sentence it was obviously wrong,
stupid, deranged or perhaps all three. Matt did read it and is righteously
angry:

I would normally ignore the nonsensical
ramblings of a journalist on issues they don’t understand, but they had to go
and attack “economists”.We get this
crap all the time, the very fact we are willing to discuss and mention
trade-offs makes people who can’t be bothered thinking convinced that we cause
the trade-off.By daring to say that
increasing the provision of healthcare costs money, the journalist has decided
to give the impression that the economist at Auckland University (who was working
in conjunction with people from other disciplines) is immoral.

Personally, I think writing articles piled
with misinformation based on an unwillingness or inability to read a university
press release has a larger degree of “immorality” than an economist discussing
trade-offs.

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers,
based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly
representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found
that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and
personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly
conservative colleagues.” This finding surprised the researchers. The survey
questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of
agreement,” Mr Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people
to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”

One question, according to the researchers,
“asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for
one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate
(i.e., over the conservative).” More than a third of the respondents said they
would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in
that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would
be sure not to hire them.” […] Generally speaking, the more liberal the
respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher
the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy.

Left is right, right is wrong. What’s the
problem here?

Finally, country singer Randy Travis makes the news again,
but not in a good way. The February
incident was bad enough, but this is plain weird. It’s one thing to be a
fan of George Jones but there is no need to emulate his nuttiness. I can’t
understand how someone rich and famous could end up in that state. Don’t they
have friends, minders? It’s not as though he had the pressure Amy Winehouse was
under. Except, and I am guessing but this is a common guess, it must be hard
being gay in Nashville – maybe even harder than in Hollywood.

Anyway, I am a big
fan and have been since his first official album Storms of Life from 1986. No
Holdin’ Back from 1989 was great too and this is its cover:

I hope he gets well soon. Here he is with
his 1989 remake of Brook Benton’s 1959 hit “It’s Just a Matter of Time”. That
low E-flat he hits on “go home” and “I know” is pretty special. All together
now, “Bom-bom-bom-bom”:

Thursday, August 9, 2012

You might think that when someone is as
self-saucing as Henry it’s almost our duty to enjoy his comeuppance. You might
be right. Hang on I’ll just check, yep, all good. You can’t say he hasn’t
enjoyed the pain of others – it’s pretty much his entire shtick. Some say he is
also good at laughing at himself, although his main skill seems to be his
ability to laugh at himself laughing at someone else – like a genetically
engineered hybrid of Beavis, Butthead and Prince Philip.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Very late last night – me dozing off to
the Economist, my wife dozing off to
her novel – we heard a cow mooing, mooing for ages and we knew from which paddock. Bit odd at
that hour, I thought. Could a dog or worse be involved? Should I – ?

My wife, who is not only a mother but also
a farmer’s daughter, said “Calving.”

Apple has arguably helped to modernise Chinese
attitudes towards enterprise and design. Chinese shoppers are eager not only to
own its products but also to learn about the man behind the company; sales of a
biography of Steve Jobs have been huge. Apple may even have helped nudge the
Chinese government towards stricter protection of intellectual property—though
pirated copies of the Jobs biography were available within days of the
original, and at a fraction of the price.

Monday, August 6, 2012

On 6 August 1966 the Troggs topped the US
charts with their single “Wild Thing”. In the 70s I was in a band whose female
singer insisted on performing it: a gay thing, possibly. Much as I liked the
Troggs – as did Iggy Pop, the Buzzcocks and the Ramones, among others – playing
this song always embarrassed me until I thought, if it’s good enough for Jimi
Hendrix…

Here, sound-only, are the Troggs arguing in
the studio about how best to record a new song called “Tranquillity”. They were
from Andover in Hampshire, most of them, and had truly rural accents. And OMFG
they could swear. A sample:

It’s your fuckin’ wife, that’s the problem,
you can’t do the solo because of your fuckin’ wife.

The tape circulated widely among musicians and is one of the
inspirations for Spinal Tap. Here is a
transcript, and here are the Troggs miming “Wild Thing” in
1966, down the Tube for some reason:

And here is Jimi Hendrix live at the
Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, with his version. It’s not how we played it:

Douglas Coupland, who knows a thing or two
about writing, offers some
practical advice. Money quote for Steve Whitehouse:

There’s no way to erase your high school
teacher’s grammar voice in your head — or your lit prof’s voice. This is good
because grammar is important. But the moment you follow any rules they gave you
about content, you’re lost. You and only you decide what the content is that
you’re going to write. Channeling a long gone prof’s elitism or quirks is
crippling.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Granting Hamilton Olympic hosting rights
makes sense, because Hamiltonians love their sport. Boxing and other fighting
disciplines are well catered for in Hamilton, with impromptu fights breaking
out every few minutes in the city streets on a Friday or Saturday night.Street racing is a favourite pastime, as is
the sport of throwing bottles as passers-by.

But rugby is the real passion in these
parts.Most Chiefs games are at least
half-full, and if we schedule Olympic events in the Waikato Stadium immediately
after big rugby matches, we believe a good number of the crowd will stay to
watch.

There are seven times more buttock
operations in Brazil than the top-25 country average, and five times more vaginal
rejuvenations. In Greece, penis enlargements are performed ten times more often
than the average.

Dark matter is out there somewhere,
possibly, it is alleged that some say. Maybe so. Or maybe so not. Hard to tell.
Could go either way, as Stuff reports:

The coming decade will be the decade of
dark matter, some scientists say, as efforts to detect the mysterious stuff
will either pay off or rule out the most promising hypothesis about what it is.
However, astronomers may have already detected signs of dark matter in the
heart of our own Milky Way galaxy, a pair of astrophysicists now say.

Chris Barton in the Herald is good, isn’t he. Here
he is on Paul Goldsmith’s new book about Alan Gibbs.

He was never one to wait in the salon, he
never wanted to wait. I would arrange everything, because every day I did 30
clients and so when he had the appointment I knew I had to arrange everything.
And then one time he came and I couldn’t arrange everything. I had four clients
and so he goes up to have his shampoo and his blue rinse, and he says to me
‘What time will you see me’, and I told him I’m not free so you have to wait a
bit, go and sit down. Anyway he had a pink bib on, and the blue rinse was going
down on it, and he was annoyed, and then he got up and then went out and went
home, with the blue rinse still on and the pink bib. The owner of Carita told
me that he’d gone home with all of the blue rinse on him, and she told me that
I have to go and to see him at home. So, I had to go to his house. She was very
furious, and she was the one who insisted that I follow him to his house and
cut his hair. So I went there and he was in his bathroom, sitting there
waiting, and he told me ‘I like Greek people’. So then I cut his hair, and then
I when I was finished I took the tip of hundred francs and I said to him ‘Now
Doctor Lacan I don’t any more want to cut your hair anymore.’

Ally of Today is my Birthday! is back and
has been looking at 50 Shades of Greydiscussed
here previously. Inspired, she has invented an Erotic
Fiction Plot Generator. Go on, you know you want to. There are many
parodies and jokes about the books – 50 Shades of Grey Power, 50 Shades of Grey
Lynn etc – but not yet, as far as I know, 50 Shades of Steve Gray. It is
only a matter of time. And I would like a percentage, please.

This view of language as property was
blessed by some of our judges in a silly period, but more recently the own goal
nature of that attitude was typified for me by the witless reaction to the
intended use by LEGO of Maori names. If there had been a genuine interest in
the promotion of the language for communication, it would have been welcomed as
a great way to get kids familiar with the vowel usages and familiar with the
tones. Instead it was treated as infringement of a proprietary secret
knowledge. Language thrives when it is used, when it is comfortable and conveys
the same meaning to speaker and hearer.When the pretended guardians of the health of the language threatened
LEGO into abandoning the plan, I knew that it was probably doomed. Those who
want it kept pure to function as the property of an elect, their ID or
passport, will never promote it as a genuine open medium of communication.

Good to see Mike Heron
becoming the new Solicitor-General. Multi-talented guy – he was a big
influence on Led Zeppelin from his years with the Incredible String Band,
seen here
at the Fillmore West in 1969 playing “Dust be Diamonds”. And, below, here they
are in 1973 with Heron’s epic “Ithkos”. Mad, but in a good way. That’s Heron
playing the harmonium, talking, and – rather shocking for a rock/folk/hippie
musician – writing notes down on paper. Clearly from the rehearsal the rest of
the band hate it and the other ISB
guy, Robin Williamson, gets very Alan Partridge passive-aggressive. Boring for
anyone who has never been in a band and horrible for anyone who doesn’t love
the ISB but for those of us who were and do, here it is: